Wednesday, 8 August 2012

Human Sacrifice in a Leicestershire Field? Narrativising a Romano-British TOT-ring

A rare silver ring dedicated to the bloodthirsty Celtic god
Totatis has been unearthed near the site of the Hallaton hoard of Roman
and Iron Age coins[...] in a field in south Leicestershire by metal detectorist Bill Martin [...] from Wolverhampton.

It was found when the site was being searched by the Bloxwich
Research and Metal
Detector Club, from the West Midlands. Mr Martin was not learning about
the history of his own locality, he'd driven some 88 km to metal detect
in a field several counties away. Once again we see the sites where
nationally important treasures have been located being targeted by other
artefact hunters, counting on the discovery of similarly valuable
finds. Surely these sites and the areas around should be protected from
such cynical exploitation? Anyway somebody is happy that this object has
been hoiked out of the ground:

Totatis ring expert Adam Daubney, of Lincolnshire County Council,
is compiling a survey on them saying the vast majority are found in
Lincolnshire. He said: "It is great to see another example turn up within the
boundaries of the Corieltavi tribe. This makes it the 74th example on my
database."
A Leicestershire County Council spokesman said [...] "It's probable
Totatis was worshipped at Hallaton as he was one of the main deities and
is often equated with Roman god Mars." The Roman poet Lucan said
devotees indulged in human sacrifice,
plunging victims head first into a vat of liquid until they drowned.

The
PAS seems to have a fixation with human sacrifice doesn't it? I really
would like to see to "Totatis expert" Daubney discuss the actual, real
evidence for these statements. It seems to me that here we have just
another example of the dumbed-down "scissors and paste history" that the
PAS seem to specialise in. We have an attempt to give decontextualised
artefacts some "narrative value" by ignoring (because non-existant in
the case of hoiked-out dugups) by mix-and-matching with classical and
Medieval (in this case) texts. But done in a way totally ignoring modern
source-criticism and the methodology of using such texts in modern
Classical historiography. First of all, the name of the 'god' discused
by Lucan was not "TOTatis".

Lucan (M. Annaeus Lucanus, 39 AD - 65 AD) came from Hispania Baetica, was writing between AD 60-65. The work in question his epic poem, Pharsalia (labelled De Bello civili
in the manuscripts), told in poetic form the story of the civil war
between Julius Caesar and Pompey in 49-48 BC, so 110 years earlier in
another region of the world entirely. And it was a poem, not history.
Toutatis or Teutates is mentioned in a poetic introduction along with a whole host of other names (including the Sarmatians) in Book one (I.445)
which primarily is intended to show the world at peace before Caesar
crossed the Rubicon. Basically what we have here is a list of Early
Imperial Roman stereotypes about their barbarian neighbours:

Thou, too, oh Treves,
Rejoicest that the war has left thy bounds.
Ligurian tribes, now shorn, in ancient days
First of the long-haired nations, on whose necks
Once flowed the auburn locks in pride supreme;
And those who pacify with blood accursed
Savage Teutates, Hesus' horrid shrines,
And Taranis' altars cruel as were those
Loved by Diana, goddess of the north;
All these now rest in peace.

Note that Lucan is not referring to these three gods as a 'triad" (as some
New-Agey-celtic-lore-writers have it), nor as gods of all the Celts, or
even of one tribe. They were apparently more or less
well-known probably regional gods, and Lucan lays stress merely on the fact that it is said that they were
worshipped with human sacrifice, before moving on to other topics.

There
is a huge body of literature, wholly ignored in what the PAS are doing
with their artefacts about just how much classical authors knew about
the geography and social structure of the regions they wrote about
beyond their borders. More critical analysts of the written sources
conclude that Roman and Greek writers were prone to project generic
visions of barbarian traits onto foreign peoples, thereby in the minds
of their readers confirming their own “cultural superiority” (like when
we read US ACCG lobbyists writing their negative and generic stereotypes
about the brown-skinned inhabitants of "source-nations"). While I
suppose I cannot blame British archaeologists for not knowing the
extensive body of this sort of analytical literature which is in Polish,
I would have expected to see some sort of critical approach adopted
even by British archaeologists to such 'records'. On the other hand, if
my suggestion that in the PAS milieu the artefacts are frequently used to illustrate the written sources this makes sense, if the
decontextualised artefacts are secondary to the written records, then it
becomes more difficult for them to dissect the latter.

Where
Lucan got the names from is unclear, though (as with most classical
"geographic" accounts) its unlikely to have been from any personal
observation, but hearsay. In his enthusing about finding an inscription
(which dot distribution maps indicate cluster in his region) 'Totatis
expert Daubney' even mentions inscriptions on altars - without noting
whether there was any evidence that these altars had been used for human
sacrifice in Roman Britain. But was Lucan writing of the British or the
Gauls? What has Lucan got to do with a local group's religion, and
furthermore (since the rings are dated second and third centuries) two hundred years after his own death? Actually the only possible answer to that question is 'absolutely nothing'.

And what about this "document in the ninth century" which describes worshippers of Toutates offering human sacrifices to
him by "plunging his victims headfirst into a vat of liquid until
drowned"? The text referred to is the Berne Scholia, an early
Medieval commentary on Lucan preserved in the Burgerbibliothek of Bern,
Switzerland. In the manuscript (which in fact may be tenth century
rather than ninth) there are glosses on Lucan's original text.
So, coming up to a thousand years later a Christian writer (probably)
in a monastery, or monastic school, was adding what he thinks Lucan was
writing about that horrible pagan religion. One of the unfortunate
things about the study of European pre-Christian religious beliefs is
that we are so dependent on the interpretation of Christian writers who
(with few exceptions) were entirely negative towards the misguided
"devil worship" of past populations. Once again, we are dealing with
stereotypes rather than any fruit of ethnographic observations. Some
have linked the information in this literary addition to the original
text (death by fire, water and hanging [air]) with the notion of
"threefold death" (and of course the New Ageyists link this with the
picture on the side of the Gundestrup cauldron - interpreting it as
"Celtic" rather than "Thracian"). The 64million dollar question of
course is what the scholar who annotated the manuscript of Lucan
somewhere in central Europe actually knew about the vanished cult of a
god worshipped in a different world a thousand years earlier in a
totally different region of the continent. The answer to that is -
because there is nothing to go on - we do not know, though it has been
suggested that both the author of the Berne document might have been
aware of a source now lost which was also known to some of the authors
of the written versions of the Old Irish myths. Who knows?

Now
a Polish visitor to England could drop a ring inscribed "God Help Legia
Football Team" in a field near Leicester, it would not mean either that
God was worshipped in that field (the owner might have gone there to relieve
himself after a visit to the pub) or that Legia played a match there.
Why does an isolated ring found in a field mean that "Totatis was
worshipped at Hallaton"? That is just unsupportable by anything that
can be found with a metal detector.

The photo (from the Leicester Mercury) makes it look as if the ring has been wire-brushed after finding, has it?

Whatever, it is
surely clear that all this guff by the Portable Antiquities Scheme
connecting a finger-ring with "TOT" on it (even if it is expanded to 'DEO TOTA [...] FELIX')
with human sacrifice is stretching the evidence beyond archaeology
into pure fiction unrelated to the actual evidence before them, which is
an isolated decontextualised object found with a metal detector.

Just
what is all this uncontrolled story-writing actually achieving?
Certainly not preservation of the archaeology of a field "near where the
Hallaton Hoard was found".

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About Me

British archaeologist living and working in Warsaw, Poland. Since the early 1990s (or even longer) a primary interest has been research on artefact hunting and collecting and the market in portable antiquities in the international context and their effect on the archaeological record.

Abbreviations used in this blog

"coiney" - a term I use for private collector of dug up ancient coins, particularly a member of the Moneta-L forum or the ACCG

"heap-of-artefacts-on-a-table-collecting" the term rather speaks for itself, an accumulation of loose artefacts with no attempt to link each item with documented origins. Most often used to refer to metal detectorists (ice-cream tubs-full) and ancient coin collectors (Roman coins sold in aggregated bulk lots)